Witty, sassy, and with an infectious joie de vivre, The Man with a Movie Camera demonstrates Dziga Vertov’s “kino-eye” theory, endowing the camera with the flexibility of the human eye and the associative powers of a poet’s brain. An ecstatic portrait of a city and its inhabitants (really three cities—Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa merged), it is a compendium of extravagant camera and editing techniques, forever commenting on itself and our own watching. Appropriately, the camera-hero takes a bow at the end.

“At once a Whitman-esque documentary-portrait of the Soviet people, a self-reflexive essay on cinematic representation, and an ode to the transformative power of human labor, this fantastically cross-referenced, cubo-kaleidoscopic city symphony took parallel action to the third—or fourth—dimension.” —J. Hoberman, Village Voice